Burch, Bill

ORAL HISTORY OF WILLIAM “BILL” BURCH
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
November 7, 2011
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is November 7, 2011, and I am at the home of Mr. Bill Burch, kind of out in the country here, aren't we?
MR. BURCH: That's exactly right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, Mr. Burch, thanks for taking time to talk to us.
MR. BURCH: Sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Why don't you take a minute and let's just start at the beginning. Tell me where you were born and something about your family, and when you were born and things such as that.
MR. BURCH: Well, I was born in a small town called Hartford, Illinois. It's near the big oil refineries near the Mississippi River at Alton and Wood River, Illinois, but my early years was mostly in the little town north of their called Jerseyville, a little town of about 5,000 people, where I went to grade school and high school. I went to college at the University of Missouri at Rolla. Actually, at that time, it was called the -- or what was it called? The University of Missouri at Rolla. No, that's not right, either. It was called the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. The full name, the University of Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. The reason I'm mixed up is because it's been changed three times, and it's now called the Missouri Science and Technology Institute, I think. Anyway --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. BURCH: -- I spent four years there to get a bachelor's degree and one more year to get a master's degree in chemical engineering, and during that last year, a recruiter from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, or maybe it was from the whole Oak Ridge site, I don't remember, came through Rolla. We interviewed, and he invited me to come to Oak Ridge for an on-site interview, which I did in the spring of 1952.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, let's go back. Let's go back to your family a little bit. So, how many brothers and sisters did you have, and what did your mom and dad do?
MR. BURCH: I have one sister, still living, two years older than me. I guess I should say my dad was a common laborer. Not quite, but he literally had no real job. In his later years, he was an insurance agent for a short time selling crop hail insurance. You'd certainly have to call him in the lower middle class, but in those days we were all poor but we didn't know it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Now, what year were you born?
MR. BURCH: In 1929.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, 1929, and so you grew up in the '30s and the '40s.
MR. BURCH: In the Depression years and in the World War II.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. So, you had an older sister, you said --
MR. BURCH: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and your mom, I imagine, was a homemaker.
MR. BURCH: She was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did she work outside the home any at all?
MR. BURCH: Hardly any. I recall her spending a few years assisting in a local retail store, but mostly it was homemaker.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, and now where did you graduate high school?
MR. BURCH: In Jerseyville.
MR. MCDANIEL: On Jerseyville. Okay.
MR. BURCH: Called Jerseyville Township High School.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, what was it like in the '30s and '40s growing up there?
MR. BURCH: Like I say, we were all poor but we didn't know it. We didn't have cars as young people. The town was small; we could walk to school. We even walked home for lunch at that time. There was no cafeteria in the school, so we walked home from lunch. For elementary school, that was four or five blocks, and for high school, it was about three quarters of a mile --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- so I got my exercise walking back and forth for lunch.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. About how many students were in your school, your high school, for example?
MR. BURCH: It must have been over 400, because there were a little over 100 in my graduating class.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right, but you graduated and, like you said, you went on to college.
MR. BURCH: Yes. Actually, I --
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was that --
MR. BURCH: -- tell you one more thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- sure.
MR. BURCH: I worked part-time in a printing office. There was a little weekly newspaper and job printing office, and starting in my high school, I mean my -- no, it was really freshman year in high school, I probably worked 10 to 15 hours a week in this printing office.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what did you do there?
MR. BURCH: Everything, because that's the wartime, World War II --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: -- and they had a group in the printing department, maybe half a dozen, and all but one or two had been drafted.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. BURCH: So, I got the opportunity to work as many hours and doing anything, so I learned how to run the linotype and all the printing presses. I set type by hand.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Some of the headlines in those days were set out the drawers --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: -- and so I literally did everything, including in my early days sweeping up the front office when I came to work. At the end of the time I worked there, and I actually worked there all of my summers in college, also --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you?
MR. BURCH: -- yeah, I could have gone on working that way fully trained --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- but that wasn't my aspiration, but it was a good start into providing funds for my college years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, and I guess college was expected. I mean it was just expected that you went to college.
MR. BURCH: Yes. My parents fully expected both of us to go to college, and we did. My sister went to a small college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota for her bachelor's degree. Gee, I forget where she went on for her other -- she didn't get a doctorate, but she was a music major.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. So, you went there and you went to college, and you studied, you said --
MR. BURCH: Chemical engineering.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- chemical engineering, and then you stayed for another year and got your master's --
MR. BURCH: That's correct. Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and then you were recruited to Oak Ridge, and you said that was, what, '52?
MR. BURCH: Fifty-two, yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Now, were you familiar with Oak Ridge and what had been done there?
MR. BURCH: Of course I knew nothing about it until the day the atomic bomb was dropped.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Not very much about it until I got serious about the possibility of working there.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, a recruiter came, and tell me from that point on.
MR. BURCH: Well, among other interesting things, I rode a train to the interview in Oak Ridge. It was something you wouldn't do now, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and I guess I was at Oak Ridge National Lab probably two days, my recollection, and I was shown around the site by a section head in the Chemical Technology Division, and one of the things I remember, he took me to the top of the Building 4500. That is considered now by people to be an old building. In that day, it hadn't been occupied. They had just completed the construction, and he took me up there so I could look down on the whole site and see what the Laboratory looked like.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure. So, you accepted a job and came in '52, is that --
MR. BURCH: July, I mean June 2, 1952, my first day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, were you married at this point?
MR. BURCH: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, tell me about your first job and what you did?
MR. BURCH: Well, I was assigned to the pilot plant section of the Chemical Technology Division. That's Building 3019. Historically, I think it's still called that name, and it was where the initial recovery of plutonium from the irradiated slugs in the Oak Ridge Reactor was done, and developed the process that was subsequently then deployed in Richmond, Washington for the wartime production of plutonium --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and when I arrived, the first job was a shift engineer on a project developing a better process for recovery of plutonium. It's what's called now the PUREX process, and that process, in some variation, is used by every country in the world that is recovering or has recovered plutonium from irradiated fuel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: So, I got my hands-on experience with radioactivity that first year. In fact, our section head at that time asked or actually sent all new employees to an analytical chemistry lab. He had an arrangement with the director of that division so that they could show you, "Here's what you have to do to protect yourself. Here's how you measure activity," with what we called “cutie pie” in those days, "Here's how you take samples. Here's how you protect yourself," because you are the one who's really going to tell you whether the radiation levels are too high. You're protecting yourself. You're not depending on somebody coming along and measuring the activity and telling you, "Do this and that." You were doing it yourself. So, I spent one month there, and then back to the role I described, the shift engineer, for the rest of that project, which lasted about a year and a half, and it was finished.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's go back to that, because my understanding is that they irradiated the slugs in the Graphite Reactor --
MR. BURCH: All the equipment was remote.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- the uranium slugs.
MR. BURCH: They were receiving irradiated slugs from Hanford --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- which were irradiated at much higher levels. The exposure was much higher. They would be brought in by trucks with shielded carriers, actually dropped in “the storage tank”, into the same water pool that the slugs from the Oak Ridge Reactor were stored in, and then we picked them up in a carrier on a two-ton truck, or whatever it was, and hauled them the 100 yards over to the building where they were raised into the shielded -- or, actually, the area above the shielded cells, and dropped out of that carrier into the equipment in the cells.
MR. MCDANIEL: Talk a little bit about that process, and for those who are non-technical or don't know anything about it, describe the process of what you would do with the uranium slug.
MR. BURCH: Okay, uranium slugs consisted of about a one-inch diameter, four-inch long slug of uranium encased in an aluminum housing. The slugs, after they were dropped into a dissolver in the shielded cell -- these cells had about six feet of concrete shielding.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: All the equipment was removed. There was no entry into these cells. The instrumentation revealed a lot of things: the liquid level, temperatures, density of solutions in these various tanks, and all solutions were transferred by means of steam jets. But, back to your question about what was done, the first step was dissolving the aluminum from the can using a strong caustic solution. This solution was then sent to the storage thing, and then the uranium slug was dissolved in strong nitric acid. This solution was then contacted in a tall pulse column. A pulse column is about a 50-foot-high column that the uranium solution, nitrate solution was dropped into the top of the column and it was contacted counter-currently with a tributyl phosphate solution. It was actually tributyl phosphate and kerosene, and the movement up and down the column was enhanced and the dispersion of the organic phase and the aqueous phase was enhanced by a pulsing action at the bottom of the column, which pushed the solution up and down in the column about one inch through a series of plates that had holes about a 32nd inch in diameter, which literally covered this plate, so the solution was dispersed in these. But the heavy phase, the aqueous, would drop down into the bottom of the column, the organic phase would go to the top, and, in doing that, the uranium and plutonium and other elements heavier than plutonium -- there was a few of those -- would be extracted into the organic phase, and the fission products would largely remain in the aqueous phase.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? So, basically --
MR. BURCH: So, your --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- fundamentally, it's like putting some dirty water in something and shaking it to let the heavier stuff go to the bottom and the lighter stuff go to the top.
MR. BURCH: Right, but this single column could obtain about a factor of 1,000 separation of the uranium and plutonium from the fission products, so the uranium/plutonium solution going out the top with the organic phase would still have about one-tenth of one percent of the fission products remaining, and so to complete further cleanup -- well, first, the solutions were converted back to aqueous phases by another set of columns using slightly different chemistry, slightly different acid concentrations, but then, this second set of columns would be used to do a second cleanup phase so that at the end of two cycles, we called them, the uranium/plutonium would have about one part in a million of the original fission products --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- so it was pretty clean.
MR. MCDANIEL: Pretty clean. Okay.
MR. BURCH: Easily detect the fission products in it, but the beta and gamma activity was very low at that point.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. So --
MR. BURCH: And we were doing, as I say, it was developing a process. The original separations in the wartime days was done by a precipitation filtration process. Those were very inefficient, generated tons of wastes that were stored at Hanford for many years, and, in fact, it's still being cleaned up these days, and there had been an earlier development of a slightly different process using a different organic extractant, but it had some disadvantages, which I'm not sure I recall. In fact, I don't --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: -- recall right now. But this last process was really the one that was considered the product that was needed to do this type of work.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you went right into that? I mean that was your first job?
MR. BURCH: Fortunately, the technicians on the job knew what was going on. I spent the first several months learning, letting them lead me around --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Of course.
MR. BURCH: -- but, you know, by that time, I was reasonably familiar with what was going on, had little comprehension of what the equipment looked like, but I understood from the control room what was happening.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: You know, in those days, the shift engineer might do some technician's job, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: I remember the first, I won't call it significant -- maybe I should call it significant exposure I received sometime during this one and a half years. There was a decision made to recover nitric acid for recycle rather than just throw the fission products with the nitric acid into the waste tanks, which were stored in another area, and so this process was started. One of the things I was doing, not as a technician but because other technicians were busy at the time so I did their job --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- I went down into a pipe tunnel, which was below the operating level but had a lot of pipes that went into the cell, the steam for the steam jets, air for the devices that measured the liquid levels, and we had a sampler down for these recovered acids, and I meandered down into the cell. We had little sample bottles, about 25 cc's, with rubber caps on the top were stuck on two needles, and an air jet would circulate solution from the tank through these needles, through the bottle, back into the tank, and this was shielded. It had probably an inch or two of lead around the bottle while you were doing this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: But, when this was over, we reached in, put the sample in the shield, but didn't realize how hot it was until I got out in the operating area. We all wore what was called -- what were they called, the direct reading dosimeters.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: We had a word for them. Anyway, I looked at mine and it was off scale, the scale being 200 millirem, and we learned I guess at that time that ruthenium was very volatile in strong nitric acid. In the evaporator, which was concentrating the acid, the ruthenium volatilized and ended up in our product.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: Now, that wasn't an extreme dose, but I received more radiation probably in that first year at work than the rest of my career. My recollection, it was in the range of 5 rem received in that year-and-a-half period.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. BURCH: That was about the standards in those days, 5 rem per year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. BURCH: Actually, not much before that, it had been 15 rem per year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: In fact, I'm not sure that it wasn't changed from 15 to 5 during that time I was there. Of course --
MR. MCDANIEL: Give us kind of a comparison. Today, what do they say you shouldn't have more than?
MR. BURCH: It all depends on whether you're a nuclear worker. If you're a nuclear worker, you could receive ten times as much as the personnel. One of the unfortunate things in retirement what I did, I didn't learn the Sievert game, so I can't speak in --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, right.
MR. BURCH: -- present-day scientific terms. I should be able to, but let me give you another analogy, which is a good way to look at it. The average person receives something in the range of 300 millirem per year. It varies quite a bit because it depends on how much you fly, where you live, how much radon is around where you live, but 300 is what they consider an average. So, in a person's lifetime, lives 60 years, let's say, that's 20 rem. That's about what I received in my total work time in Oak Ridge --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. BURCH: -- but a good fraction of that received in the first --
MR. MCDANIEL: In that first year. Yeah.
MR. BURCH: -- year and a half I worked. Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah. So, you had about 20 rem in your whole career?
MR. BURCH: Yes. Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Over how many years?
MR. BURCH: I worked 40 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Forty years. Yeah.
MR. BURCH: I retired at the end of 40 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: But a fourth of that was the first year.
MR. BURCH: Yes. I worked in one other facility where there was significant radiation levels. We could probably talk a little bit about that later.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you did that first job for a year and a half, and then what happened?
MR. BURCH: Well, the U.S. was working on developing a hydrogen bomb, and one of the components of a hydrogen bomb is lithium-6.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: At that time, both Y-12 and Oak Ridge National Laboratory were involved in developing processes to recover lithium-6, actually separate lithium-6 from the lithium-7. Most of the lithium is lithium-7, but lithium-6 is used because it -- I guess I don't really understand the exact physical chemistry of how it converts to something that then amplifies the explosive power of a hydrogen bomb. But anyway, that was what I did for a little over a year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. BURCH: That was a very interesting process because we had 1,000 gallons of mercury which we circulated through lots of piping, again through pulse columns, similar but with just different solutions --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- In this case, the lithium was actually extracted into the mercury from a strong lithium chloride propylenediamine solution, and it went through five columns 60 feet high, so a total of 300 feet of these pulse columns.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: I have to confess, the Y-12 process, which are slightly different, was better and it was the one that was used in the production.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was that the COLEX?
MR. BURCH: COLEX, that's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, ORNL did the PUREX.
MR. BURCH: No, well, and this was called OREX.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, OREX. Okay.
MR. BURCH: OREX, and we had a problem, which we never fully understood, that somehow we were getting a little moisture into the system, which was reacting with the lithium amalgam and forming a solid phase, which was recycled from one end of the column to the other so that some of the enriched lithium was being brought back down to the un-enriched part of the column. Thus, we never got nearly as high as was needed, but because these were going along and parallel and the COLEX process was working --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- our process, we took it as far as we could and, obviously, it wasn't the best so the other process was used. But it was an interesting learning process, again, for an engineer now with two years’ experience, or two and a half years’ experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did you all lose mercury like the folks at Y-12 did?
MR. BURCH: Well, probably nobody knows for sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. BURCH: Clearly, there was mercury leakage occasionally in this plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: To protect us from the effects of mercury, two things were done. One, the pans or the bottom level of the facility was lined with stainless steel pans. It was a continuous stainless steel pan, and it was filled with one or two inches of water, so any leak would drop into the water --
MR. MCDANIEL: Into the water.
MR. BURCH: -- and this would prevent the mercury from getting in the air, and then there was numerous air monitors throughout the facility that drew air through a filter paper that would turn dark if there was mercury in excess levels in the air.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: But there was mercury there, and it would be impossible to say that none got into the waste, but I think, by far, the largest amount was from Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: The lithium, was it radioactive?
MR. BURCH: Oh no. No --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so --
MR. BURCH: -- activity.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- there was no activity in the lithium, but you did have to concern yourself with the mercury because --
MR. BURCH: Mercury. Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- the mercury was an issue, so --
MR. BURCH: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- you didn't want too much exposure to that.
MR. BURCH: That's exactly right. I probably shouldn't tell this story, and maybe you want to edit it out, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: That's all right. Go ahead.
MR. BURCH: -- one of the more amusing things that I ever witnessed, simpleminded as it may sound, the mercury was cleaned up out of these pans by one of our laborers coming along with a kitchen broom and a stainless steel pail and stainless steel pan.
MR. MCDANIEL: And just rolled it in?
MR. BURCH: Just rolled it in there, and pick it up and dump it into a - sort of like about a two-gallon stainless steel pan.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Well, one day, he probably swept up maybe a half-gallon of mercury.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. BURCH: He reached down to pick it up and he couldn't move it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: I don't know what it weighed, but it was way over 100 pounds --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and a couple of us had just descended some stairs and were watching him, and we didn't know what to do. We should have gone, obviously, up to him and said, "You know, you don't understand this but this mercury is very, very heavy."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: But, instead, in about 30 seconds, he tried to raise it again, and then he left as fast as he could and we never saw him again --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- to have the opportunity to explain what would have been very simple if we had just gone ahead and said, "Hey, let us help you understand why you can't lift this." But he just thought it was nailed to the floor and --
MR. MCDANIEL: It was heavy.
MR. BURCH: -- it was heavy.
MR. MCDANIEL: That mercury is heavy, isn't it?
MR. BURCH: Thirteen times heavier than water.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that what it is?
MR. BURCH: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness.
MR. BURCH: But, again, it was a very interesting process for a young engineer in that we brought in a bunch of people like me, and many of the same technicians from the PUREX plant --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and we wrote the operating instructions and we'd just go on a 24-hour shift, you know, working shift work and do the best we can to get things started, and we made it work, although, chemically, something wasn't quite what it should have been and it didn't pan out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. BURCH: But it was an excellent opportunity for me to learn, again, something about how to operate a chemical plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So, after that process, what did you move on to?
MR. BURCH: We may have to go back to my book I wrote to be sure the course --
MR. MCDANIEL: That's all right.
MR. BURCH: The next time, I think I went to the Oak Ridge Reactor School for 12 months.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: That school was set up probably five years before I went and lasted about 10 to 12 years, something like this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: At that time, no university was teaching nuclear engineering --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: -- and so the early managers at the Laboratory decided to create this school. When I went to it, and probably throughout most of the time it existed, the majority of the students were from other places. There was about --
MR. MCDANIEL: That was ORSORT. That was --
MR. BURCH: ORSORT, Oak Ridge School --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Oak Ridge --
MR. BURCH: -- of Reactor Technology.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- that's right.
MR. BURCH: There were eight or ten from Oak Ridge in the class I went to, and the other 78, because there were about 85 in the class, were from other organizations, including six lieutenant JGs that worked for Admiral Rickover in the Nuclear Navy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. BURCH: It was a very good touch on all aspects of nuclear engineering. I was a chemical engineer. The class learned something about nuclear engineering from the chemical processing. We were exposed, also, to some Reactor situations. We did some shielding work up at the top of the Oak Ridge Reactor, and we learned how to do very simpleminded nuclear calculations for Reactors. Very intensive. We worked eight hours a day for a full 12 months, full pay, but no raise over what we had --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. BURCH: -- received the previous year. Anyway, it was a good, again, learning experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. So, why did they send you there? Did they see that there was going to be a need for you to have that knowledge, or were they sending everybody there?
MR. BURCH: No, no, certainly not everybody, but they were sending probably each year about 10 people, so maybe 100 people in its whole history for the Lab, and there might have been more in the early days. I'm not sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. BURCH: But a certain group of people would be picked if they thought their knowledge ought to be broadened --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and I was very pleased to be in the class. Certainly, I learned things that I would not have learned otherwise.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, who was teaching the classes?
MR. BURCH: Various specialists at the Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. BURCH: There was maybe one fulltime, I'll call him professional; I don't think we used those names, that sort of organized and kept things moving, but all the expertise and all the classes were taught by --
MR. MCDANIEL: But they came from folks at the Lab.
MR. BURCH: -- various folks at the Lab who had the key knowledge in the industry at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. All right, so after you got through the ORSORT, what did you do?
MR. BURCH: I believe the next was a period of about four or five years spent with the Homogeneous Reactor Test Program.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, tell us what does that mean?
MR. BURCH: In the --
MR. MCDANIEL: The Homogeneous Reactor, what is that?
MR. BURCH: -- in this timeframe, the United States was developing about six or eight types of Reactors for possible use to generate electricity.
MR. MCDANIEL: This was the mid-to-late '50s?
MR. BURCH: Yes, late '50s to early '60s --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Right.
MR. BURCH: -- and one of these projects was the Homogeneous Reactor. Actually, the Lab had operated an earlier version of this Reactor before I got to the homogeneous Reactor test, which is the one that I was involved with. It was operated in the same building that the one I was involved in was but, again, I'm not sure how to simply describe the differences but I'll ignore that and go into what it is.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: It was a vessel that had two compartments. The core was probably two feet in diameter surrounded by a blanket vessel that might have been five or six feet in diameter. The core was made out of zirconium, because it has a low fission cross-section, and the blanket vessel was stainless steel, as was all the piping in the plant. The Reactor was located in an underground cell that was sealed entirely by welding pans on top of the cell, and then covering these pans with five or six feet of concrete shielding. Again, all of the equipment was operated remotely, and the reason I got involved was because adjacent to the Reactor was a small cell which, in theory, was going to aid the Reactor by removing insoluble fission products, and thus increase the amount of plutonium that could be produced in such a Reactor, although we never operated with anything other than enriched uranium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Again, plans and ideas of men don't always pan out to be reality.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: The simple process we had was a physical separation using hydraulic cyclones. You know what a cyclone is? In this case, it was a small device about two or three inches high that operated in a cylindrical thing that spun around real rapidly --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and the solids dropped out the bottom and --
MR. MCDANIEL: I see.
MR. BURCH: -- and there was a gang of about 10 or 12 of these in a pot no bigger than this, through which five or ten gallons of solution was circulated --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. BURCH: -- and I'm sure it was a very efficient solids remover, but, unfortunately, most of the solid fission products plated out on the heat exchanger tube to the Reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: So, for several reasons, the Homogeneous Reactor was not a good example of - to make a power plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Its demise came about because of something else that wasn't known when the Reactor was started up. A hole was burned in the core of the Reactor because uranyl sulfate, which was a solution circulated, its chemistry is such that at temperatures just slightly higher than the operating temperature of the Reactor, which was about 300 centigrade, a second phase forms, which is very highly concentrated, and this phase would form on the walls of the Reactor, and because it was a high concentration, it would get very hot. One day, we were very surprised to find that all of a sudden the reactivity of the core changed in a way that something was --
MR. MCDANIEL: Not right.
MR. BURCH: -- completely wrong --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and this hole, you know, a couple inches in diameter, had been burned through the Reactor core --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. BURCH: -- and although the Reactor was operated a little bit later after an attempt was made to put a crude patch on the hole, and that was interesting because it all had to be done underwater --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. BURCH: -- with long-handled tools. Obviously, it couldn't be a good seal because it was a ragged hole.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: But that was the main reason why the Reactor was not a good example for generating electricity. You also had to operate it at 2,000 pounds pressure because of water at nearly 300 degrees centigrade, so it had a lot of things that weren't favorable for it. But anyway, again, a lot of good experience, including at one time, and then again, I didn't really do any original work, but I measured the half-life of rubidium-88 on my hands. We'd take a sample of gas, because this was the way we were going to learn whether xenon-135, and that's the biggest poison in a Reactor, that one isotope, and one of the so called advantages of the Reactor, it could remove xenon in a small stream that was dropped down from the high pressure system into a low pressure system, and that would take the xenon with it. We sampled the gas stream, which was a very small stream coming from the Reactor, and it was quite hot because it was only a few minutes old when we sampled it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: We thought we were very careful, but when we measured our hands after taking all our gloves off, it was still a little bit active and I could measure a ten-minute half-life, which must be rubidium-88 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: Yeah, but it went away quickly. If I'm going too long, tell me --
MR. MCDANIEL: No, no, no.
MR. BURCH: -- and I'll stop, but an interesting thing that happened, it was the same day that we had a quarterly information meeting; the Laboratory was inviting people in from around the country, any utility organization that wanted to send people. Every three months, we would report on what was happening the Reactor, and the morning of that meeting, we suddenly discovered that a lot of activity was going up the stack, and this is the off-gas from the Reactor, and the means of that was treated was passing it through a charcoal bed that was consisted of, first pipes of about an inch in diameter, and then pipes about two inches in diameter, and, finally, pipes six inches in diameter, each of these about 20 or 30 feet long --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- back and forth --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: -- outside in an underground water pool. And what had happened is that the reaction of radiation in the core generates hydrogen, and some of this is let down with this stream that was let down to the atmospheric pressure all the time, but it was passed through a re-combiner bed, some catalyst, probably platinum. I'm not sure about that. This is a fairly small stream. It was only a few liters a minute, which passed out to this bed where the short-life fission products would be absorbed in the charcoal, and the reason for the small bed, because the short-life generated a lot of heat.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: But either because of gas reaction, near explosion I'll call it, although that's not quite right, or just because of the heat generated, the bed caught on fire, and it probably had been burning for days. But because it was cooled under water and -- but the carbon dioxide, preferentially, was absorbed on the carbon downstream of the original, the small beds, and this eluded or removed what was mostly krypton-85, I guess, by the time it got out. But we had to shut down the Reactor, and then try to explain something at the meeting, which I don't remember how we handled it. But anyway, that was another sort of interesting --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- situation in that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So, after that Reactor project, what did you move on to next?
MR. BURCH: That would have got me up to the time of the work to generate heavy elements in the High Flux Isotope Reactor in the adjacent processing plant, where we recovered elements heavier than plutonium. But I told you a slight story, because I did spend -- a slight - I spent one year looking at trying to take a comprehensive look at what the Laboratory should be doing with all of its liquid waste around the Lab.
[Note: In review of this transcript, Mr. Burch recalled that this look at the Lab wastes occurred in about 1971-2, subsequent to his work on the HFIR/heavy element project.]
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: It started out that I spent a little over a year there heading towards the hydrofracture process, which was used to subsequently put almost all of the waste at the Laboratory underground in a concrete --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Fortunately, again, I was working with a couple of guys who knew a lot more about it than I did, so my contribution, as much as anything, it's to write up the sense of what they thought was the right thing to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you looked at what to do with the waste, with the waste that was generated there at the Lab, and you all came up with a plan.
MR. BURCH: It was the first beginning of a plan --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: -- very, very cursory, but it was the first attempt to say, "Hey, we've done things that we've got to start cleaning up."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. BURCH: As you know, those cleanups are still going on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, yes, yes. What was the result of your first -- I mean I'm sure it evolved into different things, but --
MR. BURCH: I'd probably have to say it was recognizing more detailed looks had to be done.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, and was this before the hydrofracture process?
MR. BURCH: Mm hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me a little bit about that. What was that? Explain that. Now, my under -- go ahead. I know what my understanding is and it may not be correct, so I'll let you explain it.
MR. BURCH: Well, underground in most of this part of the country, I guess, are a lot of shale beds. This is a form of geologic formation that is made up of thin sheets of rock materials, and somebody, it wasn't us in that group -- this had been envisioned several years before I got involved --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- the idea that waste could be injected down into these shale formations under pressure so that the shale formation would open up a crack between these two layers of rock, and this grout mixture of waste and concrete grout would spread out into these areas between the shale, and it did work that way.
MR. MCDANIEL: But it went down pretty far. It went down --
MR. BURCH: About 800 feet, I believe, was the --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- that's what I was thinking.
MR. BURCH: -- but it turns out, an interesting thing I learned long after I was away from there, this same shale formation actually reaches the surface of the ground just west of the Laboratory on the road.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. BURCH: That was a long ways, two or three miles, from where the wastes were being injected --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and they only spread out 100 yards or so, so it wasn't going to get there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. BURCH: But the shale formation was tilted a little bit, and that's where it would have come out on the ground if it had had a simple path, but it didn't.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now, they didn't use that for very long. They didn't do hydrofracture for very long, did they?
MR. BURCH: Well, it was done for literally all the wastes that had been accumulated to that time in the old gunite tanks.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: You're probably familiar. There were, I think, four to six of these probably 1,000-gallon gunite tanks. This is just like a swimming pool, you know --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- gunite concrete, essentially, that was built in wartime days, and that's where all the wastes that were generated at the Laboratory, the liquid wastes, were dumped up until -- again, my timeframe when that ended is not very clear now, but it's probably in the range of '90 sometime.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: After that time, they stopped doing that and individual organizations generating waste had to convert them to some form of a solid before they were transferred elsewhere.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because in the mid '80s was about when they really started doing a lot of the cleanup work, wasn't it? I mean, you know, it was --
MR. BURCH: Started, I guess, is a better --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- started.
MR. BURCH: -- yes. I'm not sure very much was done until a little bit later.
MR. MCDANIEL: But they started looking at it --
MR. BURCH: Looking seriously at it --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- pretty seriously at it.
MR. BURCH: -- right, looking seriously at it.
MR. MCDANIEL: And I'm sure that was just not an Oak Ridge thing. It was probably --
MR. BURCH: Oh yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- system-wide --
MR. BURCH: Oh yes, absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Department of Energy --
MR. BURCH: Absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- you know, all across the board. Okay, so you spent that year doing that, and then --
MR. BURCH: And then got on, as I mentioned, to the heavy element production program. Again, this was something that Glenn Seaborg started. He, of course, discovered plutonium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: I think it was 1961 he became head of the Atomic Energy Commission. In his work life, between the wartime days and then, his group at Berkeley in California was very interested in discovering new elements, the chemical properties of those elements, and there was a lot of other organizations in the country also interested in this, and throughout the rest of the world. He was in a position as head of the Atomic Energy Commission to make some things happen --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and he and Alvin Weinberg were the ones who really put the ideas together and then made it real, had this idea of the High Flux Isotope Reactor creating heavier elements, heavier than plutonium, and then being recovered in a facility adjacent to the Reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: The Reactor, and, again, I won't focus on that, but it the targets in a small cylindrical opening, probably five inches in diameter. I think it was 31 targets, which were aluminum-clad oxide pellets of plutonium-242, which has three more neutrons than plutonium used in the atomic bombs, was actually what we started with.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: The 242, which is three elements heavier than the bomb material, was actually produced at Savannah River in their production Reactors, and recovered there and provided to Oak Ridge. I guess it was about 1965 when the facility went hot.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: Actually, a little bit earlier than that, because the Reactor went critical a little bit earlier than that, maybe '64, or something like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: Anyway, these targets were in the Reactor for 6 to 12 months, and then shipped over in a heavily shielded carrier. This carrier was about a 50-ton concrete, made out of special high density and also high water content concrete, because one of the elements produced was californium-252, which is a potent neutron generator, so it had to be shielded, in addition to the beta and gamma rays coming from the targets.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me stop you there real quick and ask you a question. So, basically, Seaborg and Weinberg got together and decided to do this, but it was based upon the fact that you had learned that if you irradiated a certain element, like uranium, you could create a new element that had never existed before, like plutonium. So, this was kind of a continuation of that discovery early on of trying to create new, different elements?
MR. BURCH: A lot of these elements, recovered in much larger quantities, had already been discovered and was known, some of them, obviously, in amounts that could be measured --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. BURCH: -- but it was not enough that they could go on and --
MR. MCDANIEL: And do anything with them.
MR. BURCH: -- look for other elements higher than that, or, also, study the chemistry in more detail.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: But it was a pure research program; no other aspects, initially.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: To a large extent that was it, although californium became a commercial product, and I'll say a little bit about that. I was involved in -- in fact, in charge of -- the design of the processing equipment that went into the recovery facility and then was in charge of the operating group at the facility for I guess it was five years after the start of it. It started up in -- six years. It started up in '65, and I was there until 1971.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's stop for just a second. [Side Conversation] All right. We were talking about those heavy elements, and what you were doing there.
MR. BURCH: Yes. We used some fairly complicated chemical processes that involved both nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, so the equipment was essentially all made of either zirconium or tantalum.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you were recovering these after they'd been irradiated.
MR. BURCH: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
MR. BURCH: Dissolving the targets in nitric acid, and then going through a series of chemical steps involving solvent extraction and ion exchange, and then we also produced the targets in three cells, which took the material we had recovered, mostly americium and curium, and then fabricated them into targets that were taken back to the Reactor for further irradiation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. BURCH: So, it was four cells of the nine were chemistry, three cells were fabrication, and two cells were for analytical purposes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. So, how long did you do that work there?
MR. BURCH: Six years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Six years. Okay.
MR. BURCH: I have to tell you a couple things, if you don't mind my going longer than your 15 minutes.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's fine. You go ahead. Go ahead.
MR. BURCH: One of my favorite stories, although it wasn't a favorite at the time, was when I was up-scaled by Dr. Seaborg.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. BURCH: About a year after we went into operation, a meeting in Boston was planned to review the status and update people in the American Nuclear Society about what had been accomplished in the Reactor and our reprocessing plant --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and I was in charge, the technical chairman I guess, of one of the sessions, which was about the reprocessing. I'd prepared, as you did in those days, 15 or 20 slides just to sort of introduce things, and there was half a dozen papers after that to get into more details.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: We asked Dr. Seaborg if he would be the honorary chairman of the session, which he agreed to, and in his opening remarks he proceeded to use half of the slides that I had in my subsequent remarks. So, here I sat listening to him, wondering, "What do I do?" and so what could I do but say, "Thank you, Dr. Seaborg. That was an excellent introduction. I'm not sure I need to do any more, but I'll run quickly through the slides." In retrospect, it's an interesting story to tell but kind of embarrassing for a 35-year-old or 32-year-old engineer, whatever I was at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly. Exactly.
MR. BURCH: But I had met Dr. Seaborg when the facilities were operated, so I don't consider it a close relationship at all.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, when you were mid 30's, how old was he at that time?
MR. BURCH: Probably --
MR. MCDANIEL: Fifties?
MR. BURCH: -- late 50's or 60's --
MR. MCDANIEL: Late 50's or 60's. Right.
MR. BURCH: -- something like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. BURCH: I'd like to also say a little bit about the californium --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- because it's about the only thing that is not just pure research. It turns out that a number of organizations realized the potential use for these small neutron sources. In fact, the head of the production department then, Frank Baranowski, who was in charge of the plants at Savannah River and Hanford, envisioned that the commercial prospects were a lot higher than they turned out to be, and began the very beginnings of a program at Savannah River, because it wasn't deemed that we could produce enough. But, it turned out in a period of three to five years that it really wasn't needed and it wasn't done down there, and all of the fabrication work and the recovery was done in Oak Ridge. I don't any longer have a good idea of how many sources were made, but it's probably well over 1,000 that have been shipped to various people for such things as Reactor startup sources, neutron radiography, analogous to x-rays, but using neutrons, and they primarily will see light materials in structures --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and also for medical uses. MD Anderson Hospital in Dallas did a lot of experiments using neutrons as a thing that irradiating cancers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: So, I guess that probably is as much as I need to say about that facility. I could describe the exposure we had in the glove box, but it turned out not to be all that much.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I guess there's lots of little stories like that around, aren't there?
MR. BURCH: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, when did you retire? What year did you retire?
MR. BURCH: In 1992.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what were you doing when you retired?
MR. BURCH: Well, I spent the last -- well, first, I spent a year and a half after the heavy element program working with a private venture, which involved Union Carbide, Westinghouse and Bechtel, looking at the possibility of enriching uranium as a private corporation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- and it was an interesting year and a half. I spent 45 days in San Francisco because that's where Bechtel was located, so that was an interesting part of it. But, at the conclusion of that year and a half, it was clear that it wasn't ready for commercial, and I went back to the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: For that one year and a half, I was a private employee of Union Carbide.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. BURCH: And then, the last project I was involved in was the fuel cycle work associated with fast Reactors. That was the time when they were really starting to build, or serious about building the Clinch River Breeder Reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: We had an ancillary program looking at the special problems of processing fast Reactor fuels. In fact, in the 15 years or so that the program continued, we spent over a quarter of a billion dollars total, so it wasn't a small program. It was a lot of hardware development, a lot of hardware involved in it, and one of the major efforts was a collaboration with an organization in Japan. They sent probably 20 or 30 engineers to the facility over a period -- well, mostly in 10 years of that 20-year period --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: -- and we sent a lot of people over there for shorter periods of time. I probably traveled to Japan about ten times in this period of time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MR. BURCH: I'll tell you one other little interesting thing. You recall the Friendship Bell.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm hmm.
MR. BURCH: Of course, its focus was on the collaboration, the friendliness of collaboration between Japan and the U.S., and it was focused in Oak Ridge at that time that had changed so dramatically after the war, when we were antagonists.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: We had gotten so involved with this organization. What we were doing was a prominent part of the collaboration between Japan and the U.S. in Oak Ridge, and I had the privilege of being one of the ringers of the bell at the dedication ceremony with I'll say my counterpart from Japan.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: And another little interesting tidbit, I was working with Herman Postma at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: He was a principal manager, I guess, of getting it done in Oak Ridge, and in one discussion, I don't know how it came up -- I think he brought it up but I'm not sure -- he said, "You know, it would be kind of nice to put in this -- " what do you call the whole thing, the Friendship Bell and its --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah. Yeah, and the --
MR. BURCH: -- whatever you call the whole --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Sure. Exactly.
MR. BURCH: -- thing, a little plaque recognizing this long-term collaboration that Oak Ridge National Laboratory and our organization had with Japan, and this was placed on the bell ringer. It was tacked there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: Hardly anybody ever saw it, and somebody has stolen it. It's no longer there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, man.
MR. BURCH: But anyway, I have a copy of the plaque I'll show you after we're done here --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- that Dr. Postma gave me. One of the things that I felt most honored in my career was Dr. Postma had a program each year of describing the activities of the Lab, and he named one division in the Reactor as his division of the year, and in 1986, the division I headed was named that division. An interesting tidbit, he'd do this at the end of his speech, and then he'd go out to greet the Division Director, and he didn't know I was there. He couldn't find me. I was back in one corner, and he just assumed I wasn't there, but I caught up with him and thanked him for the honor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, let me ask you about Dr. Weinberg. Now, he was a lab director for many of the years that --
MR. BURCH: Yes --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- you worked there.
MR. BURCH: -- knew him very well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you know him well?
MR. BURCH: Oh yes, very well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about him. What kind of person was he?
MR. BURCH: Well, one of the things that a lot of people know but probably the younger people don't know, he never wanted to be called Dr. Weinberg, and he never wanted any of his PhD employees to be called doctor. Everybody was mister or their first names, and that projected a sort of informality that remember most about Dr. Weinberg.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: In his tenure as Lab Director, most of the Lab, I mean of the scientific directors of research divisions, certainly in the early days, and I'm not putting myself in that category, but most in the early days, when he was there through his time were the real experts in the world in the field they were directing, and he had a lot of good division directors and he had some that weren't so good. The last thing I'm going to do is --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, is name those, huh?
MR. BURCH: -- name any of them, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: I understand.
MR. BURCH: -- but it made good sense in those days, because that was where the expertise lie and he operated very informally and he knew a very great deal about opening a Laboratory. But no Laboratory Director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory knows what all goes in the Lab. There are too many diverse projects, too many diverse organizations to really understand everything. But he was very much a hands-on person, and I wasn't a close personal friend in any way but we knew each other well, and it would be, "Hi, Bill," when I'd see him, and I respected him very highly.
MR. MCDANIEL: The things that I know about him is he was really smart, obviously.
MR. BURCH: Oh yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did he come across that way personally? I mean was he approachable?
MR. BURCH: Oh, approachable, and he never projected anything, "I'm smart," none of that at all, but he was, obviously, and he had some ideas that didn't pan out. He was a real proponent of the Molten-Salt Reactor, and for various reasons it didn't seem to be a candidate for generating power, although there are still some people in the U.S. that think it should be, and so my opinion is only one, but I think the general consensus of that, but I have nothing but the utmost respect for Dr. Weinberg. I wanted to tell you one more story that touched me very much. My first Division Director was Floyd Culler, who I considered the easiest person to work for and the one who came down to your level and worked with you, and yet was one of the more brilliant people in the industry. He became the Director of the Chemical Technology Division when he was 29 years old, and, following a career of probably 25 or 30 years at the Laboratory, he became the head of Electric Power Research Institute in San Jose, California. The last thing I did, to make a buck, I tell my buddies, I was doing a little consulting work for EPRI. It involved taking a 75-year picture, trying to take a 75-year picture how the U.S. was going to generate electricity in that 75-year period. It was a small effort. It didn't generate anything that was worthy of publication, but it was an interesting program to work on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: But I spent four or five days in San Jose as part of that study. The last time I was there, it was planned for the wrap-up meeting. The study was done, we were going to go over the results, look at the draft reports and all that. Floyd -- he was Floyd to us, not Dr. Culler -- he wasn't a doctor. He only had a bachelor's degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: He called me, knowing I was coming out, and he said, "Bill, why don't you stay with me when you come out this time?" He had undergone a real tragedy. His wife had died just a few months, maybe only two or three months before that time. He was feeling lonely. We spent almost the entire time that I was there, not at the meetings, but around his kitchen table --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- recalling the stories, the incidents, recollections of how we worked together at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the most telling thing I guess that I experienced in my career. I had ultimate respect for him, as I did for Dr. Weinberg, and they were equally brilliant men. Dr. Weinberg had a PhD, Culler had a bachelor's degree, but he was a brilliant person. He led the ______, and again, I'm probably boring you and stretching this out longer, but the last thing I did at the Lab was a very uninteresting task when I had semi-retired and was just doing a few things, about ready to completely retire, I actually worked about a year and a half part-time before I finally left.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Charlie Kuykendall asked me if I would help in a project for, what's it called, Declassifying Secret Documents.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: The AEC, or DOE at that time, was trying to declassify documents, and so I said, "Okay, I can help," because I had a Q clearance the whole time, still did have, and the thing that was interesting in the job, although most of it was uninteresting, I got a chance to look at many of the documents that were notebooks of the people who were running the Chemical Technology Division in the very early days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah.
MR. BURCH: I found out how things were done in those days. There were three people in the country who made the decisions about how the Savannah River Plant was going to be, or the reprocessing work was going to be done. It was Floyd Culler, Clark Ice, who was the director of the Savannah River Laboratory, and Frank Baranowski, who was head of the production division in Washington. These notebooks would reveal telephone calls between these three people, and after the call the notes would say, "This we will do." It wasn't a matter of getting 15 bureaucrats in Washington to agree. I also got to know Baranowski very well because he became an advisor to our division in the fast Reactor fuel processing program, and have a world of respect for him. He was another person who was so good at letting people who didn't know nearly as much as he did pull together all of the ideas that he'd say, "Yes, I think this is about what we should do."
MR. MCDANIEL: And he probably knew all along that's what you should do.
MR. BURCH: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: He was just letting other people come up with that.
MR. BURCH: But the thing that I'd like to recall more than anything about him, he retired at a fairly young age, mid-50's or something like that, but he continued as a consultant to that part of DOE for many years, and I was in many meetings where I saw that he was the person that was leading those discussions and making the decisions, not the people in charge of those divisions at that time. They knew that he knew much more than -- of course, he had all the history --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- understood it, and his mind was so sharp at understanding the whole picture. It's just amazing to me, and sitting in on some of those meetings and seeing how he drew things to his ideas, and they were the right ones.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: I had the opportunity less than ten years ago going to Williamsburg, where he retired to at Kingsmill Golf Course. We planned to have a round of golf but it was bitterly cold, so we sat around a table at his country club all afternoon talking about the world of nuclear energy. There's a lot of people I admired greatly, but none more than Baranowski, Weinberg and Culler.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. All right.
MR. BURCH: I've probably got twice as long as it should be.
MR. MCDANIEL: No, no, no, no. So, what have you been doing since you retired?
MR. BURCH: Playing golf.
MR. MCDANIEL: Play golf.
MR. BURCH: That's my main activity.
MR. MCDANIEL: Are you good?
MR. BURCH: Oh, you shouldn't have asked. Unfortunately, the handicap only goes up as you get older.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that what happens?
MR. BURCH: And we've done a fair bit of traveling. As part of the work, I got to know my counterpart in England, back over 30 years ago now, and we've kept in contact. In fact, we've seen him and his wife five times in the last 12 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: He came here 13 straight years in the '80s to play golf in Florida, because they wanted to get out of the cold weather, and we'd join him there. But his wife now has some health problems, and he hasn't been here for six years now I guess, but we've been over there four or five times. They joined us in London for a week two years ago. We went over to see some plays.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: Another one of the people who was one of the real experts in the field. I mean when I say he was my counterpart, they did some things far beyond what we were able to do in this country because they had programs that continued in the field of reprocessing, whereas we walked away from it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: Anyway --
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. BURCH: -- another one of the people that I -- in fact, we chat with them about an hour on Skype about every month, still.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's good.
MR. BURCH: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's nice to be able to have that, to be able to visit. So, did you live in Oak Ridge when you worked there? Where did you live?
MR. BURCH: On West Outer Drive, 958 I guess it was. When we built the house, the street wasn't paved until about the time we finished the house. They paved the street at that point.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. BURCH: This is up just above Montana on West Montana --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and now it goes out another couple miles I guess.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. BURCH: But lived there at Oak Ridge the whole time.
MR. MCDANIEL: The whole time?
MR. BURCH: No, that's not the whole time. I was in a one-bedroom apartment when I came to Oak Ridge --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. BURCH: -- and built that place I guess ten years after I came to Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Now, do you have any children?
MR. BURCH: Two, a son and a daughter. A son in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was also a chemical engineer --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- at UT, and a daughter who's a schoolteacher, and actually just retired this year --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- in Knoxville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. BURCH: Six grandchildren and three and a half great-grandchildren.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you stay busy then, I imagine, don't you?
MR. BURCH: Yes. We found this is a wonderful place to live because almost every person living here comes from somewhere else, and what happens in situations like that, you look for activities and friends, new friends, and we have more than we can find time for here.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you're in Rarity Bay here in Vonore, I guess.
MR. BURCH: Yeah. Vonore is the address.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you've been here five years, six --
MR. BURCH: No, we've been here 12 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- 12 years, that's right, 12 years, and it's great golfing, great golf course.
MR. BURCH: A great golf course. I'm involved with two groups of golfers that play on Thursdays and Fridays, about a dozen in each group that pairs up different ways so we play with whole groups, and play in a lot of the tournaments, which the club organizes --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- Men's Golf Association organizes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: I hate to see my handicap going up, but that's the sad facts of life. It doesn't keep me from enjoying it, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: That is true. That is true. All right, sir. Well, Mr. Burch, I thank you so much for taking time to talk with us.
MR. BURCH: I hope it doesn't come out looking or sounding too bad.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh no, it won't. It'll be fine. Thank you.
[End of Interview]

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ORAL HISTORY OF WILLIAM “BILL” BURCH
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
November 7, 2011
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is November 7, 2011, and I am at the home of Mr. Bill Burch, kind of out in the country here, aren't we?
MR. BURCH: That's exactly right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, Mr. Burch, thanks for taking time to talk to us.
MR. BURCH: Sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Why don't you take a minute and let's just start at the beginning. Tell me where you were born and something about your family, and when you were born and things such as that.
MR. BURCH: Well, I was born in a small town called Hartford, Illinois. It's near the big oil refineries near the Mississippi River at Alton and Wood River, Illinois, but my early years was mostly in the little town north of their called Jerseyville, a little town of about 5,000 people, where I went to grade school and high school. I went to college at the University of Missouri at Rolla. Actually, at that time, it was called the -- or what was it called? The University of Missouri at Rolla. No, that's not right, either. It was called the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. The full name, the University of Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy. The reason I'm mixed up is because it's been changed three times, and it's now called the Missouri Science and Technology Institute, I think. Anyway --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. BURCH: -- I spent four years there to get a bachelor's degree and one more year to get a master's degree in chemical engineering, and during that last year, a recruiter from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, or maybe it was from the whole Oak Ridge site, I don't remember, came through Rolla. We interviewed, and he invited me to come to Oak Ridge for an on-site interview, which I did in the spring of 1952.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, let's go back. Let's go back to your family a little bit. So, how many brothers and sisters did you have, and what did your mom and dad do?
MR. BURCH: I have one sister, still living, two years older than me. I guess I should say my dad was a common laborer. Not quite, but he literally had no real job. In his later years, he was an insurance agent for a short time selling crop hail insurance. You'd certainly have to call him in the lower middle class, but in those days we were all poor but we didn't know it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Now, what year were you born?
MR. BURCH: In 1929.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, 1929, and so you grew up in the '30s and the '40s.
MR. BURCH: In the Depression years and in the World War II.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. So, you had an older sister, you said --
MR. BURCH: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and your mom, I imagine, was a homemaker.
MR. BURCH: She was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did she work outside the home any at all?
MR. BURCH: Hardly any. I recall her spending a few years assisting in a local retail store, but mostly it was homemaker.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, and now where did you graduate high school?
MR. BURCH: In Jerseyville.
MR. MCDANIEL: On Jerseyville. Okay.
MR. BURCH: Called Jerseyville Township High School.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, what was it like in the '30s and '40s growing up there?
MR. BURCH: Like I say, we were all poor but we didn't know it. We didn't have cars as young people. The town was small; we could walk to school. We even walked home for lunch at that time. There was no cafeteria in the school, so we walked home from lunch. For elementary school, that was four or five blocks, and for high school, it was about three quarters of a mile --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- so I got my exercise walking back and forth for lunch.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. About how many students were in your school, your high school, for example?
MR. BURCH: It must have been over 400, because there were a little over 100 in my graduating class.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right, but you graduated and, like you said, you went on to college.
MR. BURCH: Yes. Actually, I --
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was that --
MR. BURCH: -- tell you one more thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- sure.
MR. BURCH: I worked part-time in a printing office. There was a little weekly newspaper and job printing office, and starting in my high school, I mean my -- no, it was really freshman year in high school, I probably worked 10 to 15 hours a week in this printing office.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what did you do there?
MR. BURCH: Everything, because that's the wartime, World War II --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: -- and they had a group in the printing department, maybe half a dozen, and all but one or two had been drafted.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. BURCH: So, I got the opportunity to work as many hours and doing anything, so I learned how to run the linotype and all the printing presses. I set type by hand.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Some of the headlines in those days were set out the drawers --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: -- and so I literally did everything, including in my early days sweeping up the front office when I came to work. At the end of the time I worked there, and I actually worked there all of my summers in college, also --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you?
MR. BURCH: -- yeah, I could have gone on working that way fully trained --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- but that wasn't my aspiration, but it was a good start into providing funds for my college years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, and I guess college was expected. I mean it was just expected that you went to college.
MR. BURCH: Yes. My parents fully expected both of us to go to college, and we did. My sister went to a small college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota for her bachelor's degree. Gee, I forget where she went on for her other -- she didn't get a doctorate, but she was a music major.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. So, you went there and you went to college, and you studied, you said --
MR. BURCH: Chemical engineering.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- chemical engineering, and then you stayed for another year and got your master's --
MR. BURCH: That's correct. Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and then you were recruited to Oak Ridge, and you said that was, what, '52?
MR. BURCH: Fifty-two, yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Now, were you familiar with Oak Ridge and what had been done there?
MR. BURCH: Of course I knew nothing about it until the day the atomic bomb was dropped.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Not very much about it until I got serious about the possibility of working there.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, a recruiter came, and tell me from that point on.
MR. BURCH: Well, among other interesting things, I rode a train to the interview in Oak Ridge. It was something you wouldn't do now, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and I guess I was at Oak Ridge National Lab probably two days, my recollection, and I was shown around the site by a section head in the Chemical Technology Division, and one of the things I remember, he took me to the top of the Building 4500. That is considered now by people to be an old building. In that day, it hadn't been occupied. They had just completed the construction, and he took me up there so I could look down on the whole site and see what the Laboratory looked like.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure. So, you accepted a job and came in '52, is that --
MR. BURCH: July, I mean June 2, 1952, my first day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, were you married at this point?
MR. BURCH: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, tell me about your first job and what you did?
MR. BURCH: Well, I was assigned to the pilot plant section of the Chemical Technology Division. That's Building 3019. Historically, I think it's still called that name, and it was where the initial recovery of plutonium from the irradiated slugs in the Oak Ridge Reactor was done, and developed the process that was subsequently then deployed in Richmond, Washington for the wartime production of plutonium --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and when I arrived, the first job was a shift engineer on a project developing a better process for recovery of plutonium. It's what's called now the PUREX process, and that process, in some variation, is used by every country in the world that is recovering or has recovered plutonium from irradiated fuel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: So, I got my hands-on experience with radioactivity that first year. In fact, our section head at that time asked or actually sent all new employees to an analytical chemistry lab. He had an arrangement with the director of that division so that they could show you, "Here's what you have to do to protect yourself. Here's how you measure activity," with what we called “cutie pie” in those days, "Here's how you take samples. Here's how you protect yourself," because you are the one who's really going to tell you whether the radiation levels are too high. You're protecting yourself. You're not depending on somebody coming along and measuring the activity and telling you, "Do this and that." You were doing it yourself. So, I spent one month there, and then back to the role I described, the shift engineer, for the rest of that project, which lasted about a year and a half, and it was finished.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's go back to that, because my understanding is that they irradiated the slugs in the Graphite Reactor --
MR. BURCH: All the equipment was remote.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- the uranium slugs.
MR. BURCH: They were receiving irradiated slugs from Hanford --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- which were irradiated at much higher levels. The exposure was much higher. They would be brought in by trucks with shielded carriers, actually dropped in “the storage tank”, into the same water pool that the slugs from the Oak Ridge Reactor were stored in, and then we picked them up in a carrier on a two-ton truck, or whatever it was, and hauled them the 100 yards over to the building where they were raised into the shielded -- or, actually, the area above the shielded cells, and dropped out of that carrier into the equipment in the cells.
MR. MCDANIEL: Talk a little bit about that process, and for those who are non-technical or don't know anything about it, describe the process of what you would do with the uranium slug.
MR. BURCH: Okay, uranium slugs consisted of about a one-inch diameter, four-inch long slug of uranium encased in an aluminum housing. The slugs, after they were dropped into a dissolver in the shielded cell -- these cells had about six feet of concrete shielding.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: All the equipment was removed. There was no entry into these cells. The instrumentation revealed a lot of things: the liquid level, temperatures, density of solutions in these various tanks, and all solutions were transferred by means of steam jets. But, back to your question about what was done, the first step was dissolving the aluminum from the can using a strong caustic solution. This solution was then sent to the storage thing, and then the uranium slug was dissolved in strong nitric acid. This solution was then contacted in a tall pulse column. A pulse column is about a 50-foot-high column that the uranium solution, nitrate solution was dropped into the top of the column and it was contacted counter-currently with a tributyl phosphate solution. It was actually tributyl phosphate and kerosene, and the movement up and down the column was enhanced and the dispersion of the organic phase and the aqueous phase was enhanced by a pulsing action at the bottom of the column, which pushed the solution up and down in the column about one inch through a series of plates that had holes about a 32nd inch in diameter, which literally covered this plate, so the solution was dispersed in these. But the heavy phase, the aqueous, would drop down into the bottom of the column, the organic phase would go to the top, and, in doing that, the uranium and plutonium and other elements heavier than plutonium -- there was a few of those -- would be extracted into the organic phase, and the fission products would largely remain in the aqueous phase.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? So, basically --
MR. BURCH: So, your --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- fundamentally, it's like putting some dirty water in something and shaking it to let the heavier stuff go to the bottom and the lighter stuff go to the top.
MR. BURCH: Right, but this single column could obtain about a factor of 1,000 separation of the uranium and plutonium from the fission products, so the uranium/plutonium solution going out the top with the organic phase would still have about one-tenth of one percent of the fission products remaining, and so to complete further cleanup -- well, first, the solutions were converted back to aqueous phases by another set of columns using slightly different chemistry, slightly different acid concentrations, but then, this second set of columns would be used to do a second cleanup phase so that at the end of two cycles, we called them, the uranium/plutonium would have about one part in a million of the original fission products --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- so it was pretty clean.
MR. MCDANIEL: Pretty clean. Okay.
MR. BURCH: Easily detect the fission products in it, but the beta and gamma activity was very low at that point.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. So --
MR. BURCH: And we were doing, as I say, it was developing a process. The original separations in the wartime days was done by a precipitation filtration process. Those were very inefficient, generated tons of wastes that were stored at Hanford for many years, and, in fact, it's still being cleaned up these days, and there had been an earlier development of a slightly different process using a different organic extractant, but it had some disadvantages, which I'm not sure I recall. In fact, I don't --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: -- recall right now. But this last process was really the one that was considered the product that was needed to do this type of work.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you went right into that? I mean that was your first job?
MR. BURCH: Fortunately, the technicians on the job knew what was going on. I spent the first several months learning, letting them lead me around --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Of course.
MR. BURCH: -- but, you know, by that time, I was reasonably familiar with what was going on, had little comprehension of what the equipment looked like, but I understood from the control room what was happening.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: You know, in those days, the shift engineer might do some technician's job, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: I remember the first, I won't call it significant -- maybe I should call it significant exposure I received sometime during this one and a half years. There was a decision made to recover nitric acid for recycle rather than just throw the fission products with the nitric acid into the waste tanks, which were stored in another area, and so this process was started. One of the things I was doing, not as a technician but because other technicians were busy at the time so I did their job --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- I went down into a pipe tunnel, which was below the operating level but had a lot of pipes that went into the cell, the steam for the steam jets, air for the devices that measured the liquid levels, and we had a sampler down for these recovered acids, and I meandered down into the cell. We had little sample bottles, about 25 cc's, with rubber caps on the top were stuck on two needles, and an air jet would circulate solution from the tank through these needles, through the bottle, back into the tank, and this was shielded. It had probably an inch or two of lead around the bottle while you were doing this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: But, when this was over, we reached in, put the sample in the shield, but didn't realize how hot it was until I got out in the operating area. We all wore what was called -- what were they called, the direct reading dosimeters.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: We had a word for them. Anyway, I looked at mine and it was off scale, the scale being 200 millirem, and we learned I guess at that time that ruthenium was very volatile in strong nitric acid. In the evaporator, which was concentrating the acid, the ruthenium volatilized and ended up in our product.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: Now, that wasn't an extreme dose, but I received more radiation probably in that first year at work than the rest of my career. My recollection, it was in the range of 5 rem received in that year-and-a-half period.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. BURCH: That was about the standards in those days, 5 rem per year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. BURCH: Actually, not much before that, it had been 15 rem per year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: In fact, I'm not sure that it wasn't changed from 15 to 5 during that time I was there. Of course --
MR. MCDANIEL: Give us kind of a comparison. Today, what do they say you shouldn't have more than?
MR. BURCH: It all depends on whether you're a nuclear worker. If you're a nuclear worker, you could receive ten times as much as the personnel. One of the unfortunate things in retirement what I did, I didn't learn the Sievert game, so I can't speak in --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, right.
MR. BURCH: -- present-day scientific terms. I should be able to, but let me give you another analogy, which is a good way to look at it. The average person receives something in the range of 300 millirem per year. It varies quite a bit because it depends on how much you fly, where you live, how much radon is around where you live, but 300 is what they consider an average. So, in a person's lifetime, lives 60 years, let's say, that's 20 rem. That's about what I received in my total work time in Oak Ridge --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. BURCH: -- but a good fraction of that received in the first --
MR. MCDANIEL: In that first year. Yeah.
MR. BURCH: -- year and a half I worked. Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah. So, you had about 20 rem in your whole career?
MR. BURCH: Yes. Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Over how many years?
MR. BURCH: I worked 40 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Forty years. Yeah.
MR. BURCH: I retired at the end of 40 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: But a fourth of that was the first year.
MR. BURCH: Yes. I worked in one other facility where there was significant radiation levels. We could probably talk a little bit about that later.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you did that first job for a year and a half, and then what happened?
MR. BURCH: Well, the U.S. was working on developing a hydrogen bomb, and one of the components of a hydrogen bomb is lithium-6.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: At that time, both Y-12 and Oak Ridge National Laboratory were involved in developing processes to recover lithium-6, actually separate lithium-6 from the lithium-7. Most of the lithium is lithium-7, but lithium-6 is used because it -- I guess I don't really understand the exact physical chemistry of how it converts to something that then amplifies the explosive power of a hydrogen bomb. But anyway, that was what I did for a little over a year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. BURCH: That was a very interesting process because we had 1,000 gallons of mercury which we circulated through lots of piping, again through pulse columns, similar but with just different solutions --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- In this case, the lithium was actually extracted into the mercury from a strong lithium chloride propylenediamine solution, and it went through five columns 60 feet high, so a total of 300 feet of these pulse columns.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: I have to confess, the Y-12 process, which are slightly different, was better and it was the one that was used in the production.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was that the COLEX?
MR. BURCH: COLEX, that's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, ORNL did the PUREX.
MR. BURCH: No, well, and this was called OREX.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, OREX. Okay.
MR. BURCH: OREX, and we had a problem, which we never fully understood, that somehow we were getting a little moisture into the system, which was reacting with the lithium amalgam and forming a solid phase, which was recycled from one end of the column to the other so that some of the enriched lithium was being brought back down to the un-enriched part of the column. Thus, we never got nearly as high as was needed, but because these were going along and parallel and the COLEX process was working --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- our process, we took it as far as we could and, obviously, it wasn't the best so the other process was used. But it was an interesting learning process, again, for an engineer now with two years’ experience, or two and a half years’ experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did you all lose mercury like the folks at Y-12 did?
MR. BURCH: Well, probably nobody knows for sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. BURCH: Clearly, there was mercury leakage occasionally in this plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: To protect us from the effects of mercury, two things were done. One, the pans or the bottom level of the facility was lined with stainless steel pans. It was a continuous stainless steel pan, and it was filled with one or two inches of water, so any leak would drop into the water --
MR. MCDANIEL: Into the water.
MR. BURCH: -- and this would prevent the mercury from getting in the air, and then there was numerous air monitors throughout the facility that drew air through a filter paper that would turn dark if there was mercury in excess levels in the air.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: But there was mercury there, and it would be impossible to say that none got into the waste, but I think, by far, the largest amount was from Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: The lithium, was it radioactive?
MR. BURCH: Oh no. No --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so --
MR. BURCH: -- activity.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- there was no activity in the lithium, but you did have to concern yourself with the mercury because --
MR. BURCH: Mercury. Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- the mercury was an issue, so --
MR. BURCH: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- you didn't want too much exposure to that.
MR. BURCH: That's exactly right. I probably shouldn't tell this story, and maybe you want to edit it out, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: That's all right. Go ahead.
MR. BURCH: -- one of the more amusing things that I ever witnessed, simpleminded as it may sound, the mercury was cleaned up out of these pans by one of our laborers coming along with a kitchen broom and a stainless steel pail and stainless steel pan.
MR. MCDANIEL: And just rolled it in?
MR. BURCH: Just rolled it in there, and pick it up and dump it into a - sort of like about a two-gallon stainless steel pan.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Well, one day, he probably swept up maybe a half-gallon of mercury.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. BURCH: He reached down to pick it up and he couldn't move it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: I don't know what it weighed, but it was way over 100 pounds --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and a couple of us had just descended some stairs and were watching him, and we didn't know what to do. We should have gone, obviously, up to him and said, "You know, you don't understand this but this mercury is very, very heavy."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: But, instead, in about 30 seconds, he tried to raise it again, and then he left as fast as he could and we never saw him again --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- to have the opportunity to explain what would have been very simple if we had just gone ahead and said, "Hey, let us help you understand why you can't lift this." But he just thought it was nailed to the floor and --
MR. MCDANIEL: It was heavy.
MR. BURCH: -- it was heavy.
MR. MCDANIEL: That mercury is heavy, isn't it?
MR. BURCH: Thirteen times heavier than water.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that what it is?
MR. BURCH: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness.
MR. BURCH: But, again, it was a very interesting process for a young engineer in that we brought in a bunch of people like me, and many of the same technicians from the PUREX plant --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and we wrote the operating instructions and we'd just go on a 24-hour shift, you know, working shift work and do the best we can to get things started, and we made it work, although, chemically, something wasn't quite what it should have been and it didn't pan out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. BURCH: But it was an excellent opportunity for me to learn, again, something about how to operate a chemical plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So, after that process, what did you move on to?
MR. BURCH: We may have to go back to my book I wrote to be sure the course --
MR. MCDANIEL: That's all right.
MR. BURCH: The next time, I think I went to the Oak Ridge Reactor School for 12 months.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: That school was set up probably five years before I went and lasted about 10 to 12 years, something like this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: At that time, no university was teaching nuclear engineering --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: -- and so the early managers at the Laboratory decided to create this school. When I went to it, and probably throughout most of the time it existed, the majority of the students were from other places. There was about --
MR. MCDANIEL: That was ORSORT. That was --
MR. BURCH: ORSORT, Oak Ridge School --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Oak Ridge --
MR. BURCH: -- of Reactor Technology.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- that's right.
MR. BURCH: There were eight or ten from Oak Ridge in the class I went to, and the other 78, because there were about 85 in the class, were from other organizations, including six lieutenant JGs that worked for Admiral Rickover in the Nuclear Navy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. BURCH: It was a very good touch on all aspects of nuclear engineering. I was a chemical engineer. The class learned something about nuclear engineering from the chemical processing. We were exposed, also, to some Reactor situations. We did some shielding work up at the top of the Oak Ridge Reactor, and we learned how to do very simpleminded nuclear calculations for Reactors. Very intensive. We worked eight hours a day for a full 12 months, full pay, but no raise over what we had --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. BURCH: -- received the previous year. Anyway, it was a good, again, learning experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. So, why did they send you there? Did they see that there was going to be a need for you to have that knowledge, or were they sending everybody there?
MR. BURCH: No, no, certainly not everybody, but they were sending probably each year about 10 people, so maybe 100 people in its whole history for the Lab, and there might have been more in the early days. I'm not sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. BURCH: But a certain group of people would be picked if they thought their knowledge ought to be broadened --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and I was very pleased to be in the class. Certainly, I learned things that I would not have learned otherwise.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, who was teaching the classes?
MR. BURCH: Various specialists at the Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. BURCH: There was maybe one fulltime, I'll call him professional; I don't think we used those names, that sort of organized and kept things moving, but all the expertise and all the classes were taught by --
MR. MCDANIEL: But they came from folks at the Lab.
MR. BURCH: -- various folks at the Lab who had the key knowledge in the industry at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. All right, so after you got through the ORSORT, what did you do?
MR. BURCH: I believe the next was a period of about four or five years spent with the Homogeneous Reactor Test Program.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, tell us what does that mean?
MR. BURCH: In the --
MR. MCDANIEL: The Homogeneous Reactor, what is that?
MR. BURCH: -- in this timeframe, the United States was developing about six or eight types of Reactors for possible use to generate electricity.
MR. MCDANIEL: This was the mid-to-late '50s?
MR. BURCH: Yes, late '50s to early '60s --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Right.
MR. BURCH: -- and one of these projects was the Homogeneous Reactor. Actually, the Lab had operated an earlier version of this Reactor before I got to the homogeneous Reactor test, which is the one that I was involved with. It was operated in the same building that the one I was involved in was but, again, I'm not sure how to simply describe the differences but I'll ignore that and go into what it is.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: It was a vessel that had two compartments. The core was probably two feet in diameter surrounded by a blanket vessel that might have been five or six feet in diameter. The core was made out of zirconium, because it has a low fission cross-section, and the blanket vessel was stainless steel, as was all the piping in the plant. The Reactor was located in an underground cell that was sealed entirely by welding pans on top of the cell, and then covering these pans with five or six feet of concrete shielding. Again, all of the equipment was operated remotely, and the reason I got involved was because adjacent to the Reactor was a small cell which, in theory, was going to aid the Reactor by removing insoluble fission products, and thus increase the amount of plutonium that could be produced in such a Reactor, although we never operated with anything other than enriched uranium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Again, plans and ideas of men don't always pan out to be reality.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: The simple process we had was a physical separation using hydraulic cyclones. You know what a cyclone is? In this case, it was a small device about two or three inches high that operated in a cylindrical thing that spun around real rapidly --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and the solids dropped out the bottom and --
MR. MCDANIEL: I see.
MR. BURCH: -- and there was a gang of about 10 or 12 of these in a pot no bigger than this, through which five or ten gallons of solution was circulated --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. BURCH: -- and I'm sure it was a very efficient solids remover, but, unfortunately, most of the solid fission products plated out on the heat exchanger tube to the Reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: So, for several reasons, the Homogeneous Reactor was not a good example of - to make a power plant.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Its demise came about because of something else that wasn't known when the Reactor was started up. A hole was burned in the core of the Reactor because uranyl sulfate, which was a solution circulated, its chemistry is such that at temperatures just slightly higher than the operating temperature of the Reactor, which was about 300 centigrade, a second phase forms, which is very highly concentrated, and this phase would form on the walls of the Reactor, and because it was a high concentration, it would get very hot. One day, we were very surprised to find that all of a sudden the reactivity of the core changed in a way that something was --
MR. MCDANIEL: Not right.
MR. BURCH: -- completely wrong --
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and this hole, you know, a couple inches in diameter, had been burned through the Reactor core --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. BURCH: -- and although the Reactor was operated a little bit later after an attempt was made to put a crude patch on the hole, and that was interesting because it all had to be done underwater --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. BURCH: -- with long-handled tools. Obviously, it couldn't be a good seal because it was a ragged hole.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: But that was the main reason why the Reactor was not a good example for generating electricity. You also had to operate it at 2,000 pounds pressure because of water at nearly 300 degrees centigrade, so it had a lot of things that weren't favorable for it. But anyway, again, a lot of good experience, including at one time, and then again, I didn't really do any original work, but I measured the half-life of rubidium-88 on my hands. We'd take a sample of gas, because this was the way we were going to learn whether xenon-135, and that's the biggest poison in a Reactor, that one isotope, and one of the so called advantages of the Reactor, it could remove xenon in a small stream that was dropped down from the high pressure system into a low pressure system, and that would take the xenon with it. We sampled the gas stream, which was a very small stream coming from the Reactor, and it was quite hot because it was only a few minutes old when we sampled it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: We thought we were very careful, but when we measured our hands after taking all our gloves off, it was still a little bit active and I could measure a ten-minute half-life, which must be rubidium-88 --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: Yeah, but it went away quickly. If I'm going too long, tell me --
MR. MCDANIEL: No, no, no.
MR. BURCH: -- and I'll stop, but an interesting thing that happened, it was the same day that we had a quarterly information meeting; the Laboratory was inviting people in from around the country, any utility organization that wanted to send people. Every three months, we would report on what was happening the Reactor, and the morning of that meeting, we suddenly discovered that a lot of activity was going up the stack, and this is the off-gas from the Reactor, and the means of that was treated was passing it through a charcoal bed that was consisted of, first pipes of about an inch in diameter, and then pipes about two inches in diameter, and, finally, pipes six inches in diameter, each of these about 20 or 30 feet long --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- back and forth --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: -- outside in an underground water pool. And what had happened is that the reaction of radiation in the core generates hydrogen, and some of this is let down with this stream that was let down to the atmospheric pressure all the time, but it was passed through a re-combiner bed, some catalyst, probably platinum. I'm not sure about that. This is a fairly small stream. It was only a few liters a minute, which passed out to this bed where the short-life fission products would be absorbed in the charcoal, and the reason for the small bed, because the short-life generated a lot of heat.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: But either because of gas reaction, near explosion I'll call it, although that's not quite right, or just because of the heat generated, the bed caught on fire, and it probably had been burning for days. But because it was cooled under water and -- but the carbon dioxide, preferentially, was absorbed on the carbon downstream of the original, the small beds, and this eluded or removed what was mostly krypton-85, I guess, by the time it got out. But we had to shut down the Reactor, and then try to explain something at the meeting, which I don't remember how we handled it. But anyway, that was another sort of interesting --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- situation in that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. So, after that Reactor project, what did you move on to next?
MR. BURCH: That would have got me up to the time of the work to generate heavy elements in the High Flux Isotope Reactor in the adjacent processing plant, where we recovered elements heavier than plutonium. But I told you a slight story, because I did spend -- a slight - I spent one year looking at trying to take a comprehensive look at what the Laboratory should be doing with all of its liquid waste around the Lab.
[Note: In review of this transcript, Mr. Burch recalled that this look at the Lab wastes occurred in about 1971-2, subsequent to his work on the HFIR/heavy element project.]
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: It started out that I spent a little over a year there heading towards the hydrofracture process, which was used to subsequently put almost all of the waste at the Laboratory underground in a concrete --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Fortunately, again, I was working with a couple of guys who knew a lot more about it than I did, so my contribution, as much as anything, it's to write up the sense of what they thought was the right thing to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you looked at what to do with the waste, with the waste that was generated there at the Lab, and you all came up with a plan.
MR. BURCH: It was the first beginning of a plan --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: -- very, very cursory, but it was the first attempt to say, "Hey, we've done things that we've got to start cleaning up."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. BURCH: As you know, those cleanups are still going on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, yes, yes. What was the result of your first -- I mean I'm sure it evolved into different things, but --
MR. BURCH: I'd probably have to say it was recognizing more detailed looks had to be done.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, and was this before the hydrofracture process?
MR. BURCH: Mm hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me a little bit about that. What was that? Explain that. Now, my under -- go ahead. I know what my understanding is and it may not be correct, so I'll let you explain it.
MR. BURCH: Well, underground in most of this part of the country, I guess, are a lot of shale beds. This is a form of geologic formation that is made up of thin sheets of rock materials, and somebody, it wasn't us in that group -- this had been envisioned several years before I got involved --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- the idea that waste could be injected down into these shale formations under pressure so that the shale formation would open up a crack between these two layers of rock, and this grout mixture of waste and concrete grout would spread out into these areas between the shale, and it did work that way.
MR. MCDANIEL: But it went down pretty far. It went down --
MR. BURCH: About 800 feet, I believe, was the --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- that's what I was thinking.
MR. BURCH: -- but it turns out, an interesting thing I learned long after I was away from there, this same shale formation actually reaches the surface of the ground just west of the Laboratory on the road.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. BURCH: That was a long ways, two or three miles, from where the wastes were being injected --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and they only spread out 100 yards or so, so it wasn't going to get there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MR. BURCH: But the shale formation was tilted a little bit, and that's where it would have come out on the ground if it had had a simple path, but it didn't.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now, they didn't use that for very long. They didn't do hydrofracture for very long, did they?
MR. BURCH: Well, it was done for literally all the wastes that had been accumulated to that time in the old gunite tanks.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: You're probably familiar. There were, I think, four to six of these probably 1,000-gallon gunite tanks. This is just like a swimming pool, you know --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- gunite concrete, essentially, that was built in wartime days, and that's where all the wastes that were generated at the Laboratory, the liquid wastes, were dumped up until -- again, my timeframe when that ended is not very clear now, but it's probably in the range of '90 sometime.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: After that time, they stopped doing that and individual organizations generating waste had to convert them to some form of a solid before they were transferred elsewhere.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because in the mid '80s was about when they really started doing a lot of the cleanup work, wasn't it? I mean, you know, it was --
MR. BURCH: Started, I guess, is a better --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- started.
MR. BURCH: -- yes. I'm not sure very much was done until a little bit later.
MR. MCDANIEL: But they started looking at it --
MR. BURCH: Looking seriously at it --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- pretty seriously at it.
MR. BURCH: -- right, looking seriously at it.
MR. MCDANIEL: And I'm sure that was just not an Oak Ridge thing. It was probably --
MR. BURCH: Oh yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- system-wide --
MR. BURCH: Oh yes, absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Department of Energy --
MR. BURCH: Absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- you know, all across the board. Okay, so you spent that year doing that, and then --
MR. BURCH: And then got on, as I mentioned, to the heavy element production program. Again, this was something that Glenn Seaborg started. He, of course, discovered plutonium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: I think it was 1961 he became head of the Atomic Energy Commission. In his work life, between the wartime days and then, his group at Berkeley in California was very interested in discovering new elements, the chemical properties of those elements, and there was a lot of other organizations in the country also interested in this, and throughout the rest of the world. He was in a position as head of the Atomic Energy Commission to make some things happen --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and he and Alvin Weinberg were the ones who really put the ideas together and then made it real, had this idea of the High Flux Isotope Reactor creating heavier elements, heavier than plutonium, and then being recovered in a facility adjacent to the Reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: The Reactor, and, again, I won't focus on that, but it the targets in a small cylindrical opening, probably five inches in diameter. I think it was 31 targets, which were aluminum-clad oxide pellets of plutonium-242, which has three more neutrons than plutonium used in the atomic bombs, was actually what we started with.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: The 242, which is three elements heavier than the bomb material, was actually produced at Savannah River in their production Reactors, and recovered there and provided to Oak Ridge. I guess it was about 1965 when the facility went hot.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: Actually, a little bit earlier than that, because the Reactor went critical a little bit earlier than that, maybe '64, or something like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: Anyway, these targets were in the Reactor for 6 to 12 months, and then shipped over in a heavily shielded carrier. This carrier was about a 50-ton concrete, made out of special high density and also high water content concrete, because one of the elements produced was californium-252, which is a potent neutron generator, so it had to be shielded, in addition to the beta and gamma rays coming from the targets.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me stop you there real quick and ask you a question. So, basically, Seaborg and Weinberg got together and decided to do this, but it was based upon the fact that you had learned that if you irradiated a certain element, like uranium, you could create a new element that had never existed before, like plutonium. So, this was kind of a continuation of that discovery early on of trying to create new, different elements?
MR. BURCH: A lot of these elements, recovered in much larger quantities, had already been discovered and was known, some of them, obviously, in amounts that could be measured --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. BURCH: -- but it was not enough that they could go on and --
MR. MCDANIEL: And do anything with them.
MR. BURCH: -- look for other elements higher than that, or, also, study the chemistry in more detail.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: But it was a pure research program; no other aspects, initially.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: To a large extent that was it, although californium became a commercial product, and I'll say a little bit about that. I was involved in -- in fact, in charge of -- the design of the processing equipment that went into the recovery facility and then was in charge of the operating group at the facility for I guess it was five years after the start of it. It started up in -- six years. It started up in '65, and I was there until 1971.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's stop for just a second. [Side Conversation] All right. We were talking about those heavy elements, and what you were doing there.
MR. BURCH: Yes. We used some fairly complicated chemical processes that involved both nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, so the equipment was essentially all made of either zirconium or tantalum.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you were recovering these after they'd been irradiated.
MR. BURCH: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
MR. BURCH: Dissolving the targets in nitric acid, and then going through a series of chemical steps involving solvent extraction and ion exchange, and then we also produced the targets in three cells, which took the material we had recovered, mostly americium and curium, and then fabricated them into targets that were taken back to the Reactor for further irradiation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. BURCH: So, it was four cells of the nine were chemistry, three cells were fabrication, and two cells were for analytical purposes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. So, how long did you do that work there?
MR. BURCH: Six years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Six years. Okay.
MR. BURCH: I have to tell you a couple things, if you don't mind my going longer than your 15 minutes.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's fine. You go ahead. Go ahead.
MR. BURCH: One of my favorite stories, although it wasn't a favorite at the time, was when I was up-scaled by Dr. Seaborg.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. BURCH: About a year after we went into operation, a meeting in Boston was planned to review the status and update people in the American Nuclear Society about what had been accomplished in the Reactor and our reprocessing plant --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and I was in charge, the technical chairman I guess, of one of the sessions, which was about the reprocessing. I'd prepared, as you did in those days, 15 or 20 slides just to sort of introduce things, and there was half a dozen papers after that to get into more details.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: We asked Dr. Seaborg if he would be the honorary chairman of the session, which he agreed to, and in his opening remarks he proceeded to use half of the slides that I had in my subsequent remarks. So, here I sat listening to him, wondering, "What do I do?" and so what could I do but say, "Thank you, Dr. Seaborg. That was an excellent introduction. I'm not sure I need to do any more, but I'll run quickly through the slides." In retrospect, it's an interesting story to tell but kind of embarrassing for a 35-year-old or 32-year-old engineer, whatever I was at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly. Exactly.
MR. BURCH: But I had met Dr. Seaborg when the facilities were operated, so I don't consider it a close relationship at all.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, when you were mid 30's, how old was he at that time?
MR. BURCH: Probably --
MR. MCDANIEL: Fifties?
MR. BURCH: -- late 50's or 60's --
MR. MCDANIEL: Late 50's or 60's. Right.
MR. BURCH: -- something like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. BURCH: I'd like to also say a little bit about the californium --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- because it's about the only thing that is not just pure research. It turns out that a number of organizations realized the potential use for these small neutron sources. In fact, the head of the production department then, Frank Baranowski, who was in charge of the plants at Savannah River and Hanford, envisioned that the commercial prospects were a lot higher than they turned out to be, and began the very beginnings of a program at Savannah River, because it wasn't deemed that we could produce enough. But, it turned out in a period of three to five years that it really wasn't needed and it wasn't done down there, and all of the fabrication work and the recovery was done in Oak Ridge. I don't any longer have a good idea of how many sources were made, but it's probably well over 1,000 that have been shipped to various people for such things as Reactor startup sources, neutron radiography, analogous to x-rays, but using neutrons, and they primarily will see light materials in structures --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and also for medical uses. MD Anderson Hospital in Dallas did a lot of experiments using neutrons as a thing that irradiating cancers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: So, I guess that probably is as much as I need to say about that facility. I could describe the exposure we had in the glove box, but it turned out not to be all that much.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I guess there's lots of little stories like that around, aren't there?
MR. BURCH: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, when did you retire? What year did you retire?
MR. BURCH: In 1992.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what were you doing when you retired?
MR. BURCH: Well, I spent the last -- well, first, I spent a year and a half after the heavy element program working with a private venture, which involved Union Carbide, Westinghouse and Bechtel, looking at the possibility of enriching uranium as a private corporation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- and it was an interesting year and a half. I spent 45 days in San Francisco because that's where Bechtel was located, so that was an interesting part of it. But, at the conclusion of that year and a half, it was clear that it wasn't ready for commercial, and I went back to the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: For that one year and a half, I was a private employee of Union Carbide.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. BURCH: And then, the last project I was involved in was the fuel cycle work associated with fast Reactors. That was the time when they were really starting to build, or serious about building the Clinch River Breeder Reactor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: We had an ancillary program looking at the special problems of processing fast Reactor fuels. In fact, in the 15 years or so that the program continued, we spent over a quarter of a billion dollars total, so it wasn't a small program. It was a lot of hardware development, a lot of hardware involved in it, and one of the major efforts was a collaboration with an organization in Japan. They sent probably 20 or 30 engineers to the facility over a period -- well, mostly in 10 years of that 20-year period --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: -- and we sent a lot of people over there for shorter periods of time. I probably traveled to Japan about ten times in this period of time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MR. BURCH: I'll tell you one other little interesting thing. You recall the Friendship Bell.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm hmm.
MR. BURCH: Of course, its focus was on the collaboration, the friendliness of collaboration between Japan and the U.S., and it was focused in Oak Ridge at that time that had changed so dramatically after the war, when we were antagonists.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: We had gotten so involved with this organization. What we were doing was a prominent part of the collaboration between Japan and the U.S. in Oak Ridge, and I had the privilege of being one of the ringers of the bell at the dedication ceremony with I'll say my counterpart from Japan.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: And another little interesting tidbit, I was working with Herman Postma at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: He was a principal manager, I guess, of getting it done in Oak Ridge, and in one discussion, I don't know how it came up -- I think he brought it up but I'm not sure -- he said, "You know, it would be kind of nice to put in this -- " what do you call the whole thing, the Friendship Bell and its --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah. Yeah, and the --
MR. BURCH: -- whatever you call the whole --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Sure. Exactly.
MR. BURCH: -- thing, a little plaque recognizing this long-term collaboration that Oak Ridge National Laboratory and our organization had with Japan, and this was placed on the bell ringer. It was tacked there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: Hardly anybody ever saw it, and somebody has stolen it. It's no longer there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, man.
MR. BURCH: But anyway, I have a copy of the plaque I'll show you after we're done here --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- that Dr. Postma gave me. One of the things that I felt most honored in my career was Dr. Postma had a program each year of describing the activities of the Lab, and he named one division in the Reactor as his division of the year, and in 1986, the division I headed was named that division. An interesting tidbit, he'd do this at the end of his speech, and then he'd go out to greet the Division Director, and he didn't know I was there. He couldn't find me. I was back in one corner, and he just assumed I wasn't there, but I caught up with him and thanked him for the honor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, let me ask you about Dr. Weinberg. Now, he was a lab director for many of the years that --
MR. BURCH: Yes --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- you worked there.
MR. BURCH: -- knew him very well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you know him well?
MR. BURCH: Oh yes, very well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about him. What kind of person was he?
MR. BURCH: Well, one of the things that a lot of people know but probably the younger people don't know, he never wanted to be called Dr. Weinberg, and he never wanted any of his PhD employees to be called doctor. Everybody was mister or their first names, and that projected a sort of informality that remember most about Dr. Weinberg.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: In his tenure as Lab Director, most of the Lab, I mean of the scientific directors of research divisions, certainly in the early days, and I'm not putting myself in that category, but most in the early days, when he was there through his time were the real experts in the world in the field they were directing, and he had a lot of good division directors and he had some that weren't so good. The last thing I'm going to do is --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, is name those, huh?
MR. BURCH: -- name any of them, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: I understand.
MR. BURCH: -- but it made good sense in those days, because that was where the expertise lie and he operated very informally and he knew a very great deal about opening a Laboratory. But no Laboratory Director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory knows what all goes in the Lab. There are too many diverse projects, too many diverse organizations to really understand everything. But he was very much a hands-on person, and I wasn't a close personal friend in any way but we knew each other well, and it would be, "Hi, Bill," when I'd see him, and I respected him very highly.
MR. MCDANIEL: The things that I know about him is he was really smart, obviously.
MR. BURCH: Oh yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did he come across that way personally? I mean was he approachable?
MR. BURCH: Oh, approachable, and he never projected anything, "I'm smart," none of that at all, but he was, obviously, and he had some ideas that didn't pan out. He was a real proponent of the Molten-Salt Reactor, and for various reasons it didn't seem to be a candidate for generating power, although there are still some people in the U.S. that think it should be, and so my opinion is only one, but I think the general consensus of that, but I have nothing but the utmost respect for Dr. Weinberg. I wanted to tell you one more story that touched me very much. My first Division Director was Floyd Culler, who I considered the easiest person to work for and the one who came down to your level and worked with you, and yet was one of the more brilliant people in the industry. He became the Director of the Chemical Technology Division when he was 29 years old, and, following a career of probably 25 or 30 years at the Laboratory, he became the head of Electric Power Research Institute in San Jose, California. The last thing I did, to make a buck, I tell my buddies, I was doing a little consulting work for EPRI. It involved taking a 75-year picture, trying to take a 75-year picture how the U.S. was going to generate electricity in that 75-year period. It was a small effort. It didn't generate anything that was worthy of publication, but it was an interesting program to work on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: But I spent four or five days in San Jose as part of that study. The last time I was there, it was planned for the wrap-up meeting. The study was done, we were going to go over the results, look at the draft reports and all that. Floyd -- he was Floyd to us, not Dr. Culler -- he wasn't a doctor. He only had a bachelor's degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: He called me, knowing I was coming out, and he said, "Bill, why don't you stay with me when you come out this time?" He had undergone a real tragedy. His wife had died just a few months, maybe only two or three months before that time. He was feeling lonely. We spent almost the entire time that I was there, not at the meetings, but around his kitchen table --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- recalling the stories, the incidents, recollections of how we worked together at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the most telling thing I guess that I experienced in my career. I had ultimate respect for him, as I did for Dr. Weinberg, and they were equally brilliant men. Dr. Weinberg had a PhD, Culler had a bachelor's degree, but he was a brilliant person. He led the ______, and again, I'm probably boring you and stretching this out longer, but the last thing I did at the Lab was a very uninteresting task when I had semi-retired and was just doing a few things, about ready to completely retire, I actually worked about a year and a half part-time before I finally left.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: Charlie Kuykendall asked me if I would help in a project for, what's it called, Declassifying Secret Documents.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: The AEC, or DOE at that time, was trying to declassify documents, and so I said, "Okay, I can help," because I had a Q clearance the whole time, still did have, and the thing that was interesting in the job, although most of it was uninteresting, I got a chance to look at many of the documents that were notebooks of the people who were running the Chemical Technology Division in the very early days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah.
MR. BURCH: I found out how things were done in those days. There were three people in the country who made the decisions about how the Savannah River Plant was going to be, or the reprocessing work was going to be done. It was Floyd Culler, Clark Ice, who was the director of the Savannah River Laboratory, and Frank Baranowski, who was head of the production division in Washington. These notebooks would reveal telephone calls between these three people, and after the call the notes would say, "This we will do." It wasn't a matter of getting 15 bureaucrats in Washington to agree. I also got to know Baranowski very well because he became an advisor to our division in the fast Reactor fuel processing program, and have a world of respect for him. He was another person who was so good at letting people who didn't know nearly as much as he did pull together all of the ideas that he'd say, "Yes, I think this is about what we should do."
MR. MCDANIEL: And he probably knew all along that's what you should do.
MR. BURCH: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: He was just letting other people come up with that.
MR. BURCH: But the thing that I'd like to recall more than anything about him, he retired at a fairly young age, mid-50's or something like that, but he continued as a consultant to that part of DOE for many years, and I was in many meetings where I saw that he was the person that was leading those discussions and making the decisions, not the people in charge of those divisions at that time. They knew that he knew much more than -- of course, he had all the history --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- understood it, and his mind was so sharp at understanding the whole picture. It's just amazing to me, and sitting in on some of those meetings and seeing how he drew things to his ideas, and they were the right ones.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: I had the opportunity less than ten years ago going to Williamsburg, where he retired to at Kingsmill Golf Course. We planned to have a round of golf but it was bitterly cold, so we sat around a table at his country club all afternoon talking about the world of nuclear energy. There's a lot of people I admired greatly, but none more than Baranowski, Weinberg and Culler.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. All right.
MR. BURCH: I've probably got twice as long as it should be.
MR. MCDANIEL: No, no, no, no. So, what have you been doing since you retired?
MR. BURCH: Playing golf.
MR. MCDANIEL: Play golf.
MR. BURCH: That's my main activity.
MR. MCDANIEL: Are you good?
MR. BURCH: Oh, you shouldn't have asked. Unfortunately, the handicap only goes up as you get older.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that what happens?
MR. BURCH: And we've done a fair bit of traveling. As part of the work, I got to know my counterpart in England, back over 30 years ago now, and we've kept in contact. In fact, we've seen him and his wife five times in the last 12 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: He came here 13 straight years in the '80s to play golf in Florida, because they wanted to get out of the cold weather, and we'd join him there. But his wife now has some health problems, and he hasn't been here for six years now I guess, but we've been over there four or five times. They joined us in London for a week two years ago. We went over to see some plays.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: Another one of the people who was one of the real experts in the field. I mean when I say he was my counterpart, they did some things far beyond what we were able to do in this country because they had programs that continued in the field of reprocessing, whereas we walked away from it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: Anyway --
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. BURCH: -- another one of the people that I -- in fact, we chat with them about an hour on Skype about every month, still.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's good.
MR. BURCH: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's nice to be able to have that, to be able to visit. So, did you live in Oak Ridge when you worked there? Where did you live?
MR. BURCH: On West Outer Drive, 958 I guess it was. When we built the house, the street wasn't paved until about the time we finished the house. They paved the street at that point.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MR. BURCH: This is up just above Montana on West Montana --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. BURCH: -- and now it goes out another couple miles I guess.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. BURCH: But lived there at Oak Ridge the whole time.
MR. MCDANIEL: The whole time?
MR. BURCH: No, that's not the whole time. I was in a one-bedroom apartment when I came to Oak Ridge --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MR. BURCH: -- and built that place I guess ten years after I came to Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Now, do you have any children?
MR. BURCH: Two, a son and a daughter. A son in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was also a chemical engineer --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- at UT, and a daughter who's a schoolteacher, and actually just retired this year --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. BURCH: -- in Knoxville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. BURCH: Six grandchildren and three and a half great-grandchildren.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you stay busy then, I imagine, don't you?
MR. BURCH: Yes. We found this is a wonderful place to live because almost every person living here comes from somewhere else, and what happens in situations like that, you look for activities and friends, new friends, and we have more than we can find time for here.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you're in Rarity Bay here in Vonore, I guess.
MR. BURCH: Yeah. Vonore is the address.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you've been here five years, six --
MR. BURCH: No, we've been here 12 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- 12 years, that's right, 12 years, and it's great golfing, great golf course.
MR. BURCH: A great golf course. I'm involved with two groups of golfers that play on Thursdays and Fridays, about a dozen in each group that pairs up different ways so we play with whole groups, and play in a lot of the tournaments, which the club organizes --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. BURCH: -- Men's Golf Association organizes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. BURCH: I hate to see my handicap going up, but that's the sad facts of life. It doesn't keep me from enjoying it, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: That is true. That is true. All right, sir. Well, Mr. Burch, I thank you so much for taking time to talk with us.
MR. BURCH: I hope it doesn't come out looking or sounding too bad.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh no, it won't. It'll be fine. Thank you.
[End of Interview]